A MOBILE SOCIAL SHOPPING PLATFORM IN THE CLOUD

Situation

VIZL™ enables retailers and brands to embed next generation social shopping technology into mobile applications. An app powered by VIZL™ allows customers to digitally try-on clothes and accessories, create stunning new looks and share with friends for immediate feedback. The app becomes consumers’ anywhere, anytime, shopping companion.
VIZL™ includes Visualizer technology which places a cutting-edge digital dressing room on the consumer’s smartphone where they can try on apparel, jewelry and accessories instantly on images of themselves, friends and family members. VIZL™ also provides Color Search and Digital Closet allowing the smartphone camera to become a digital stylist. Snapshots of every day fashion discoveries (in a store, favorites from your closet or that a friend is wearing) are matched and coordinated with new items to create perfect outfits. VIZL™ includes Visualizer technology which places a cutting-edge digital dressing room on the consumer’s smartphone where they can try on apparel, jewelry and accessories instantly on images of themselves, friends and family members.

VIZL™ also provides Color Search and Digital Closet allowing the smartphone camera to become a digital stylist. Snapshots of every day fashion discoveries (in a store, favorites from your closet or that a friend is wearing) are matched and coordinated with new items to create perfect outfits.
To power VIZL™, ProSent Mobile requires a cost- effective, highly reliable and flexible server hosting environment with the ability to scale rapidly.

» The onboarding process was easy and quick. ProfitBricks support has been incredibly responsive and helpful in answering all of our questions. Their virtual data center model allows us to quickly and easily increase capacity as our needs change. «

Prosent Mobile

Solution

The 3D modeling in VIZL™ requires a performance intensive back-end system offering robust computing power and low network latency. The platform, built on Oracle and Tomcat running in a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 environment, was originally developed on a dedicated server leased from a large managed hosting provider. Because of its inability to scale, and the need to improve performance, ProSent Mobile began to look at cloud computing solutions and ProfitBricks.
When one of ProSent’s partners launches a marketing campaign for an app powered by VIZL™, server usage spikes along with the resulting downloads. Using ProfitBricks, increasing server resources like CPU cores, memory, and disk space takes a few clicks, in mere seconds, using the intuitive Data Center Designer. Resource scaling is now just a “drag and drop” and pull down menu experience vs. expanding physical server environments.

ProSent Mobile’s San Francisco Bay Area-based Director of Engineering manages the business relationship with ProfitBricks, as well as all configuration changes to the virtual servers, like CPU cores, memory, storage, etc. Their international engineering and program management team members set up and administer the server software. In addition, the operations team also monitors the loading and utilization rates to ensure good performance.

ProfitBricks is so easy-to-use, ProSent doesn’t need to have an expensive, high-level IT person on-staff to configure their servers or to manage running configuration scripts. The DCD shows everything, even pricing adjustments, very clearly. As new clients are added to the VIZL™ platform, they are easy to setup and scale.

The ProfitBricks team is very responsive to ProSent Mobile’s needs. “During the initial set-up of our server, the ProfitBricks support team helped us get going including step-by-step assistance on configuring the data center using DCD or Data Center Designer,” adds Mr. Papazickos. “It is so easy to use!”
The ProfitBricks DCD – a ‘virtual whiteboard’ – is incredibly easy to use to design and setup a Virtual Data Center with servers, storage, load balancers, firewalls and complex networking. Once complete, maintaining and scaling Virtual Data Centers is “drag and drop easy” – and does not require any complicated tables, forms or slow service requests.